Heretofore information has been hand entered into forms by placing an "X" or a check (or even just a smudge) within a box, indicating the selection of a particular option offered by the form. The entries on the form were then reviewed by a clerk (or scanned by a data processing system). The clerk (or computer) merely detected the presence or absence of an entry in the box next to each option, regardless of the shape of the hand entered marks. This prior "fill in the box" approach is a single symbol technique, incapable of supporting complex options involving a set of different hand entered symbols.
Bar codes have been employed on labels for processing documents. However bar codes are not generally human readable, and do not offer the human interface convenience and flexibility of hand entered symbols.
Multiple symbol data has been hand entered into a string of box sites. The writer prints each character of routine information such as his name and address into a separate box site. The box sites located and confined the characters, which assisted in line and character segmentation. However, the lack of a uniform hand printing font among various writers creates complex OCR problems.
US patent x,xxx,xxx issued Month Day, Year (application Ser. No. 08/524,996 filed Sept. 8, 1995) and assigned to the present assignee, teaches a data entry system for distributing record data throughout a user network. Transmittal information for directing the distribution is presented to the system on a magnetic disk which is read by the system through a disk drive.